


as virtuous men pass mildly away

by lanyon



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M, a for angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-02
Updated: 2012-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-30 12:01:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/331538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/pseuds/lanyon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not like on television </p><p>On television, doctors always have perfect hair and make-up. They never look exhausted. They never say the wrong fucking thing at the wrong fucking time. Clint hears about it later; some careless junior mentioned that Bed Five was circling the drain and Steve nearly throttled him. Steve. Captain Fucking America nearly killed a doctor because he said what they all know. </p><p>Bed Five is fucked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> +Title from John Donne's _Valediction Forbidding Mourning_  
>  + **Warning** for medical mumbo-jumbo and graphic depiction of sickness, though no violence.  
> 

It’s not like on television

 

On television, doctors always have perfect hair and make-up. They never look exhausted. They never say the wrong fucking thing at the wrong fucking time. Clint hears about it later; some careless junior mentioned that Bed Five was circling the drain and Steve nearly throttled him. Steve. Captain Fucking America nearly killed a doctor because he said what they all know.

 

Bed Five is fucked.

 

No one is quite sure what happened. That’s the worst of it. Clint is sitting here in the intensive care unit, surrounded by nurses in pale blue scrubs and doctors who look too tired to know their own name, much less how to treat the very sick and Phil Coulson is very sick.

 

It’s not like on television.  _Grey’s Anatomy_ never shows it like this; Phil’s lips are dry and cracked and they say they’re going to do a tracheostomy. He’s had a breathing tube in his mouth for the past five days. The ventilator is noisy but the machines don’t beep. Clint eyeballs the lines and spikes that make no sense, the glowing numbers that don’t add up, and he shifts uncomfortably every time a staff member hits the ‘mute’ button on a monitor. Phil’s skin is taut and a little waxy.

 

“Forty-eight year-old male,” the doctors say, on every round. “Day five post-admission for unwitnessed collapse in the field.”

 

§

 

Clint rubs at his eyes, digging at them with the heels of his hands until he sees stars. He’s trying to remember what he last said to Phil. Probably something daft or unprofessional over the comms. All of the Avengers were in fine fettle. It’s always easier to beat on robots than people and, eventually, evil robot manufacturers will learn not to flag their creations’ weak spots. The sorts of weak spots that can be taken out with a hammer or a well-aimed arrow (and every one of Clint’s arrows is well-aimed).

 

No one actually noticed when Coulson stopped contributing to the to-and-fro. The doctors talk about unknown downtime. All Clint really remembers was how Phil’s car was parked in the same place and the driver door was open and the sun was flashing off the wing mirror and it was a beautiful fucking day. Phil was slumped over the wheel, his laptop open on the seat next to him and spilled coffee on the dashboard. Clint always tells Phil to put the goddamned lid on the coffee cup when he’s driving. Phil always rolls his eyes and tells Clint he’s not an idiot.

 

§

 

One of the intensivists says that it looks like Phil had a heart attack but they’re not quite sure. Apparently, there’s not really any way of figuring out what caused it because all his tests are normal. Clint is faintly horrified that Phil’s condition is such a mystery. All the tests that they’ve done have shown that there is nothing wrong anywhere. His brain is fine and his lungs were fine but now they’re talking about a touch of pneumonia and Clint wonders how one can have a ‘touch’ of anything of the sort. 

 

For a guy of his age, says one of the nurses, he’s pretty fit. (Clint wants to throttle her for that.)

 

Intensivist is a weird word. Clint thinks that they look anything but intense. They’re all laconic and laidback and intimidatingly intelligent. Clint just figured they’d be more wound-up, given the job they do. Clint sometimes forgets that people think the same of the Avengers, most of whom are so laidback that they’re horizontal, except when Agent Coulson is in hospital and not one of them wants to leave his bedside. (They’re all upstanding now.)

 

§

 

Clint’s fingers circle around Phil’s. His eyes are fixed on Phil’s wristband. _Philip C Coulson; 17.01.1964_.

 

They think – some of them think – that it was something Loki did or maybe something the robots did and that’s why the doctors can’t figure out what’s going on. It’s always easier to assume evil than chance or bad fucking luck. The nurses are right. Phil is pretty fit for a guy of his age. In a world of superhumans, he holds his own, and one of the goddamned doctors asked if he’d been under any stress lately.

 

Tony laughed at that. He’s _Coulson_ , Tony said, as though that answered anything. It sort of did. The Avengers are legends and Phil is the man who keeps them on the relatively straight and somewhat narrow. It’s like herding cats, he’s said in the past, sinking into bed and smiling indulgently at Clint.

 

§

 

Who’s his next of kin?  
  
That’s always going to be a difficult question to answer except that it’s there in black and white. Janice May Coulson, Phil’s eldest sister.

 

It’s Clint’s fingers circling around Phil’s, though.

 

Janice arrives with her daughter, who’s twenty-three and pregnant. They know it’s going to be a boy.

 

Clint doesn’t want to hear how they’re going to call him Philip. It sounds too much like a memorial and _let me tell you about your great-uncle Philip who died before you were born_.

 

§

 

Sometimes, there’s interference in the equipment and it seems like everything goes haywire. It all lends credence to the theory that it’s not a recognised medical condition.

 

Clint doesn’t know if that’s better or worse. All he knows is that there is something about output diminishing and anuria and now Phil’s on dialysis because everything’s fucking shutting down and there’s nothing wrong with him.

 

Clint rests his chin on the bed and looks up at Phil. From here – no – from here, he looks dreadful, just as he looks dreadful from any angle in the room; by the door, by the window and always at night, by the ghoulish light of the monitors.

 

§

 

The solution comes from Thor and Asgard. Clint is afraid to hope. Still, everyone pays attention when a big guy with a huge sword walks in. The thing is, that’s probably not the strangest thing ever to happen in a SHIELD medical facility. He is accompanying a statuesque woman, who has kindly eyes. Heimdall and Frigga. Clint wonders if he should stand or bow or curtsey but Frigga walks over to Phil and lays a hand on his forehead and smiles gently.

 

_This is the man,_ she says, _who keeps watch over my son_. Heimdall, who keeps watch over everyone, simply nods.

 

§

 

No one’s ever heard of the apples of Idunn and no one actually knows what they’ll do to a mortal. They halt the Asgardian ageing process and this is the first time that Thor has seemed more alien than god. It’s like seeing through the illusion. No one told him that a magician doesn’t give away his secrets.

 

§

 

“How are you planning on introducing the – uh – substance?”

 

“We don’t know anything about it.”  
  
“Is it IV?”  
  
“It’s dangerous.”

 

“He’s inotrope-dependent, on dialysis and he’s NPO. We don’t know what sort of interactions-“  
  
Nick Fury cracks eventually and declares that he’s not waiting around for FDA approval. If this works, it works. If it doesn’t –

 

§

 

There are stipulations that come all the way from Odin. The apples will be delivered by Heimdall and no one else shall taste or touch them.

 

It halts the ageing process. They can only hope that it halts the decaying process.

 

§

 

Before it is to happen, this daft experiment of apples and discord, everyone files past. It’s like a goddamned wake and Phil is still breathing. At one point, the room is full. Thor and Tony and Steve at one side of the bed. Clint and Fury and Natasha on the other side, with Phil’s sisters and brothers-in-law. Bruce lingering near the door. Sitwell, looking shocked, stands near him.

 

At one point, Sitwell murmurs, “It should have been me.”  
  
It’s a TV cliché and Clint can kind of appreciate what Sitwell means but there’s this awkward silence. He raises his red-rimmed eyes and looks at Sitwell and everyone sucks in a breath.

 

“Of course it shouldn’t have,” says Clint. “You’re Coulson’s Coulson. He’d be fucked without you.”  
  
And Clint’s not here to make other people feel better but sometimes it feels like no one else is even trying.

 

§

 

Clint closes his eyes. Enough smoke and mirrors for one day. He keeps a firm hold of Phil’s hand and tries not to listen to the whirring and gurgling. He knows that there are men behind the curtain, with clipboards, eager to record what is happening and what is to happen.

 

Behind his own eyelids, Clint can envisage the future. Sponge baths. He’s especially looking forward to helping Phil’s nurses out with those. After Phil’s discharged from hospital, there’ll be an extended vacation, somewhere hot. There’ll be a stern talking-to about next of kin details. If Phil wants to take early retirement, Clint will do the same. If Phil wants to carry on being the Avengers’ handler, Clint will stick to him like glue. He’s quite prepared to piss Phil off thoroughly if it means that, some day, Phil’s fingers circle around Clint’s and there is no fucking pain, settling behind Clint’s sternum like a ton weight.

 

§

  
He thinks of Snow White and of the Judgment of Paris. He thinks of apple pie in the diner down the street from Phil’s old apartment. He thinks that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. He thinks that'd be pretty sweet and he thinks no one can fault him now for his abhorrence of hospitals and sick bays. 

 

§

 

There is a stutter of breath. 


	2. Epilogue I & Epilogue II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a stutter of breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> +Sorry. I had to tick _that_ box and I seriously dithered over posting this at all.  
>  +Apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson and Dylan Thomas.  
> + **Warning** for death (and for after-death).  
>  + **Warning** for experimental prose.  
>  +And, yes, there is a choice on how to read this: I & II are two separate storylines but II is also a continuation of I and it'll all end up the same, no matter how you flip the epilogue-coin.

THE END

 

The path forks. Life is a Choose Your Own Adventure chronicle. Cannon to the right and cannon to the left (and we are born to die) and there is a choice to be made.

 

I.

 

 

 

There is a stutter of breath. In-and-out and a rattling cough. He can’t speak because of the trache. It’s okay, though; it’ll be okay. He never needs to say much to make his feelings known and Clint’s heart breaks at the confusion in his eyes.

 

It is a world of no.

 

II.

 

 

 

There is a stutter of breath.

 

It is Clint’s own gasping sigh when nothing happens.

No change in the monitor, dutifully recording Coulson’s failed heart.

No change in his expression, if something so waxy and pale could be called an expression.

 

I.

 

 

It’s okay, though; it’ll be okay.

 

Phil was never a frail man but now he is bedbound. There is hope that he’ll independent, some day. In spite of high-tech pressure mattresses, his muscles are wasting and his fists are clenched and his legs are flexed and the painful contractures are slow to loosen, in spite of Clint’s best efforts at rubbing the tension out of his legs.

 

Sometimes, Phil nearly smiles but he looks so tired.

 

II.

 

 

It’s okay, though; it’ll be okay.

 

Just as the living fear death, so the dead fear life. Phil’s fingers linger on gravestones that have not yet been carved. Each one breathes and pulses. It is all warmth. It is all life. Now that he is dead, he can only wait and fear for his living friends and family, for his living partner who would, of course, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Phil misses him. He wishes there was a way to say that death is not so bad. His mother is here; his beautiful young mother, and his father. She knows, too, of course, what it is to wait.

 

I.

 

It is hard.

 

It is hard to tell what the apples have done. They have pulled Phil back from the brink but now he is on a tightrope and Clint knows all about those. He’s in hospital more often than he’s not and they’re in the unusual situation of having to make use of a SHIELD nursing home. It’s not that SHIELD operatives live long enough to retire, of course. The residents are men and women who were injured in the line of duty and who simply cannot function in the big bad world.  Most of them are young.  All of them are beyond repair. Clint thinks he might be betraying Phil by even considering such a place for him.

 

Phil is labeled as a post-myocardial infarction, post-sepsis, post-prolonged ICU stay. Everything is after and that breaks Clint’s heart, too.

 

 

II.

 

 

It is hard.

 

It is hard to cool one’s heels on a distant shore and wait the interminable wait. For all that Clint is reckless, he leads a charmed life and he leads a long life. Phil shouldn’t resent it. He should be glad. He just wants (to merge, to have, to hold, to sift through Clint like all these grains of strangely silver sand that slip through his fingers and)

 

 

 

I.

 

 

And then it’s over.

 

Phil dies three years to the day after his heart attack. Even Clint started to think of it as such. There were no other explanations and the apples of Idunn could only do so much for a failing mortal body.

 

There is something so ignominious about it. After years spent dallying with death and superheroes, it’s just not fair that Phil Coulson should die of something so mundane.  

 

Phil doesn’t think so, though. Before his death, it was the one thing he said. Whenever Clint said _this isn’t fair_ , Phil smiled gently and said that this happens to so many people; it would have been unfair if it hadn’t happened to him, too.

 

 

II.

 

 

And then it’s over.

 

Phil has always been a patient man. He stands up and shields his eyes against the something-sun in this place. He hears his mother’s laughter in the distance but he sees that familiar shape, sauntering towards him as though he has all the time in the world (he does).

 

Years, maybe, have passed but Clint looks young and there’s a shit-eating grin on his face and Phil doesn’t even get a chance to demand what took him so long (what heroics, what fighting, what living-breathing-laughing-) before Clint is tugging his hand and jerking his head towards the sometime-sea and whispering _race you_

 

 

 

THE END

 

And, at the end of all things, that path leads to the same place.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
